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Monday, 28 January 2013

Our first year in operation: $450M of cloud-spend forecast

It was one year ago today that we launched PlanForCloud.com, and what a year it has been. Since our launch, we have forecast over $450M of cloud spend, that’s over $1.2M of cloud spend running through our simulation engine every day!

$450,000,000

This massive number is a result of the thousands of users that we have, who use PlanForCloud to do some of the following:1 - Understand Capex vs OpexThe change from purchasing up-front to the pay-as-you-go model has left many enterprises confused about how much they should budget for their IT on the cloud. Our users have been using PlanForCloud to model requirements and different growth patterns to see how much it would cost them if they were to move applications to a public cloud.2 - Decode Complicated Pricing ModelsWe currently support 5 cloud providers (AWS, Rackspace, Azure, Google, SoftLayer). From these five cloud providers, our database holds over 10,000 price points! Think of a massive matrix with these dimensions: different cloud providers, different clouds, different offerings, different operating systems, different purchase options and on top of all of this, combined tiers of pricing. You can navigate your way around these prices using PlanForCloud.3 - Compare Cloud OptionsWith so many different offerings from different cloud providers, naturally users want to compare their options. Answering the question of “which cloud” certainly should include factors well beyond costs, however, costs are one element that everyone needs to evaluate. In addition, even users that have selected a cloud provider need to evaluate the various options that are available. PlanForCloud simplifies this process - users can determine the cost impact of different purchase options (Reserved Instances vs On-Demand), different clouds and different resource choices.With that, I would like to thank all of our users for all the great feedback and use cases they have brought to us; I would also like to thank everyone at RightScale for their help and guidance during this exciting growth stage. Finally, I would like to thank Ali, Alistair, Chris, Marc and John for their hard work. I am very excited about our next year as we are still growing - come join our team in the TechCube!-- Hassan HosseiniProduct Manager at PlanForCloud